“My Screen Was Idle For 28 Minutes”: Top-Performing Employee Gets Scolded By New Manager

Managers are the backbone of an organization’s culture. Their ability to recognize and appreciate employees’ contributions, as well as address concerns and promote a healthy work-life balance, builds a pleasant and productive atmosphere at work.

Except when it doesn’t. Poor leaders can undermine even the most positive aspects of a company, leading to diminished trust, hindered teamwork, and stifled employee motivation, ultimately creating a toxic workplace.

Sadly, Reddit user Dry_Text1712‘s new superior is on the track to joining the latter ranks. Recently, they made a post on the popular subreddit ‘Anti Work‘ to vent about their superior’s short-sightedness, and it serves as a reminder that bosses need to be constantly aware of their impact on their subordinates.

Employee recognition boosts morale, increases motivation, and enhances their overall job satisfaction and performance

Image credits: juriymaslak / envato (not the actual photo)

But this worker, instead of receiving congratulations for being the number one performer in their department, was threatened instead

Image credits: nd3000 / envato (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Dry_Text1712

Employee surveillance has been on the rise, but such practices could backfire on employers

Image credits: MART PRODUCTION / Pexels (not the actual photo)

Micromanagers have long existed in workplaces, but the normalization of working from home and hybrid arrangements since the pandemic has fueled what’s called “productivity paranoia.”

The term describes an obsessive suspicion that remote employees are not working as efficiently as they would be if they were in the office, where they know they are easily observed.

In fact, 85% of leaders have trouble believing their workers are being productive if they’re working from elsewhere.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that demand for employee monitoring software has skyrocketed in recent years. According to one report, searches for such products rose by 75% in March 2020 compared with the 2019 monthly average, and demand remained strong in 2021 and 2022.

“It is definitely not new — there’s been surveillance since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there were punch cards for people to come in and out of factories,” Kathryn Weaver, a partner at law firm Seyfarth, told CNBC.

“But that has increased excessively over the last few years … largely under the guise of ensuring workplace safety and confidentiality and protecting the business.”

Most types of employee monitoring software in the market now make it possible for users to see everything on a desktop in real-time — from keystrokes, browsing activity, emails, chat apps, etc.

A report from ExpressVPN found that close to 80% of employers use some sort of monitoring software to track employee performance and online activity. Some managers (73%) even take it further, and store recordings of staff calls, emails, or messages to evaluate their performance.

However, if the intent of surveillance is to control, to make sure that my employee is seated for X number of hours at a desk, then the entire basis of remote working is lost.

A 2021 study showed that employee monitoring has a lot of potential to backfire — monitored employees were substantially more likely to take unapproved breaks and purposely work at a slower pace than they could.

I guess, as one of the people who commented on the Reddit post, the whole ordeal is just incentivizing Dry_Text1712 to process 428 requests a month only.

People felt really sorry for the author of the post

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